


Sherlock: I

by johnwatsonswindmachine



Series: Breaking Down the Pieces [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Drabble Collection, Ficlet, Ficlet Collection, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-17
Updated: 2012-06-17
Packaged: 2017-11-07 22:49:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/436311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/johnwatsonswindmachine/pseuds/johnwatsonswindmachine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of post-Reichenbach drabbles that will hopefully coalesce into a plot at some point.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sherlock: I

There's a moment, when you're faking your suicide, when you're falling – if you're falling very, very far or you think very, very fast or both – there's a moment when you think that maybe, just maybe, this isn't going to work.

It's not actually a moment, because a moment is defined as 90 seconds, and it takes far less time than that to fall from the world's highest building, and much less to fall from the roof of St. Bart's Hospital in London. It's not even a second. It's a brief flash, a quick firing of neurons, realized action potentials of the amygdala filling you with fear. Actual fear, not the kind synthesized in a laboratory. And it's abominable.

But then you land and oh Christ it hurts and there's so much to do, so many little things that must be done perfectly and must be done now, because the lives that depend on those things are the lives that matter, and you forget it. You don't forget that it was there, but you forget the feeling of it, and that's the same as forgetting it altogether, really. You move on to the puzzle, to playing bloodhound, to killing killers.

But it comes back. At the closest of calls and the most dead of ends, when you have lost your leads in a tangle of continents, when you are wrong _wrong **wrong**_ and it costs you so very, very much. It haunts you when you have secured the perimeter of your run-down motel room as best you can and tucked the gun that kissed James Moriarty into the afterlife under your unused pillow.

And each time you recognize it as what it is. It is sentiment; it is caring when caring won't help you save them; it is not an advantage.

But, you realize, you never needed one.


End file.
